Thoughts on enterprise IT

Dustin Amrhein

Dustin Amrhein joined IBM as a member of the development team for WebSphere Application Server. While in that position, he worked on the development of Web services infrastructure and Web services programming models. In his current role, Dustin is a technical specialist for cloud, mobile, and data grid technology in IBM's WebSphere portfolio. He blogs at http://dustinamrhein.ulitzer.com. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/damrhein.

The Open Virtualization Format Specification is not exactly new. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) published the first version in February of 2009 and version 1.1 in January of this year. However, just because the specification has been around for a while does not prevent a ...

It seems rather straightforward that as cloud computing adoption increases and the state of the art evolves, we will see a natural move by consumers toward cloud services that provide a higher level of abstraction. Discounting cloud-based software services (which I believe constitute t...

If you are someone who works in the cloud computing and advanced virtualization sector day in and day out, you may have a perspective that makes it easy to forget that this movement is still very much in its infancy. Personally, from time-to-time, I find it easy to forget how early the...

Many enterprises out there are at a point in time when they are making a very important decision regarding their enterprise applications: To move or not to move. Of course, I’m talking about the decision of moving applications to a cloud computing environment or continuing to deploy in...

In my mind, the cloud computing ‘sell’ is pretty straight forward. Fundamentally, cloud computing is a proposition of improving the time to value ratio for end users. Cloud solutions enable users address their needs faster (and in some cases cheaper) than traditional approaches to the ...

Depending on the user or entity, there are likely to be any number of reasons for them to choose a particular PaaS platform. They will make their choices based on things like programming language support, quality of service offerings, and pricing to name but a few. While all of those h...

Recently, there seems to be an increasing amount of chatter in the Platform as a Service domain. From my point of view, a good bit of this chatter is within the cloud industry, but I suspect and hope that this will soon correlate into more consumers interested in talking about this fac...

One of the comparison points between the public and private cloud domains is the difference in the level of control and customization over the cloud-based service. In a public cloud environment, users typically receive highly standardized (and in many cases commoditized) IT services fr...

Just over a year ago, IBM announced the availability of the initial version of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. Today, an announcement signals the coming availability of WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0, and that brings the major release count up to three in a period of about 12 months (the...

The use of virtual images as a means of delivering enterprise-ready software is more or less a mainstream part of IT operations in today’s world. We see quite a few different types of software, from development tools to the applications they build, delivered as virtual machines through...

Among both users and industry professionals, there is no shortage of discussion about mapping application types to the different cloud domains (public, private, hybrid, etc.). In my experience, quite a bit of this discussion centers on breaking down the characteristics and traits of th...

Chances are if you are using the cloud to run your application environments, you are using some type of virtual image. For the most part, you can categorize these virtual images as one of two types: those that include an operating system and those that do not.
You may think, "What's t...

From a constrained viewpoint, the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance serves as a virtualization management solution for WebSphere application environments. In that light, I cannot tell you how many times customers ask me to delineate WebSphere CloudBurst from the other virtualization manag...

There is no doubt that cloud computing is raising both the awareness and ubiquity of the use of virtualization technologies. As I see it in the application middleware space, users are getting increasingly comfortable with the idea of capturing complete software stacks as virtual images...

Many of you are no strangers to virtualization. In fact, lots of you have been doing it in some form or fashion since the mainframe days. Virtualization is probably as hot now as it ever has been, thanks in part to the cloud fervor, but also due to the fact that it is making its way up...

When it comes to my technical expertise in IT security, I’m generally familiar enough to know I should not pretend to be an expert. However, that has not kept me from getting a lot of valuable insight at the RSA conference this week. RSA has provided me the opportunity to hear a lot ab...

In life, occasionally it is refreshing to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. In the context of cloud computing, it is imperative that you do this quite often. While it is easy to be focused and locked into a particular segment of the cloud, as I often do with PaaS, users ...

Last week I wrote a post raising the point that cloud providers need to go beyond looking at some of the technical challenges typically presented as hurdles to cloud computing adoption, namely security, and begin to investigate the cultural challenges to cloud adoption. When it comes t...

If you are a cloud provider or consumer, specifically in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) landscape, it’s hard not to be excited by the work going on in the Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group. Owing to the growing number of IaaS providers and increasing adoption of the ...

Normally when you read or hear someone talk about application environments running on cloud platforms a lot of focus is put on provisioning and elasticity. Mainly the claims are that you should be able to very quickly provision full application environments on the cloud platform and th...

Yesterday the TM Forum announced the creation of the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council. The idea behind this council is to group the world's largest cloud buyers (Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank have already joined) to help vendors and industry groups "understand the nee...

A look at several different cloud computing solutions will reveal a technological enabler present in almost each one. The enabler I'm talking about is the use of virtual images. I cannot think of many, if any, cloud computing solutions that provide software elements (i.e. more than jus...

Imagine for a moment that you’re a software developer who has been charged with adding a new feature to into your company’s billing system application that allows bills to be automatically sent to customers via email. You spend weeks, possibly months, working on the new function, and t...

Well, everyone knew it wouldn’t be long before cloud computing got thrown under the proverbial bus after the latest Sidekick failure. Observers point at this specific failure, as they have with Gmail, Amazon, and other cloud provider outages in the past, as a broader problem. Some like...

As enterprise interest in cloud computing offerings and concepts continues to increase, the number of solutions in both the public and private cloud spaces increases as well. Theres been much debate over public versus private cloud, even to the point of debating whether there can be su...

A recent survey from F5 indicates that the cloud computing movement is making significant headway despite what some may see as mere fluff and hype. The survey comprised of employees from large enterprises (2500+ employees), indicated that 82% of respondents are in some stage of public ...

The Open Group recently announced the formation of the Cloud Work Group. According to the Open Group, this new group “exists to create a common understanding among buyers and suppliers of how enterprises of all sizes and scales of operation can include Cloud Computing technology in a s...

Over the past two weeks I’ve been talking to IT architects and engineers from companies of all sizes and across many industries about cloud computing. It seems that many are moving past the talk and hype of cloud computing and looking into implementation details. Many of the companies ...

Recently, I attended SOAWorld 2009 in New York City, and I had the pleasure of listening to many distinguished speakers talk about extremely interesting topics. One of my favorite talks was given by a fellow IBMer, Kareem Yusuf. During the course of Kareem's keynote, he discussed SOA,...

This is a blog about the importance of cloud solutions that are organized as services. As more and more cloud computing offerings hit the market, I think it is becoming increasingly important that users understand what to look for in such solutions. It is one thing to provide something...

The new IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is a one-stop shop for creating, deploying, and managing WebSphere virtual systems in a private cloud. It has quite a lot of very cool features that make this a possibility, and I could go on and on about those features.

There’s no shortage of opinions on how cloud computing and SOA are related. Just plug the phrase into your favorite search engine and you’ll have a day’s worth of reading. What you are likely to find are articles discussing how SOA led to cloud computing, how a good SOA is a prerequisi...

It seems like just about every cloud computing discussion with a development audience results in the same question being asked: “Why does this matter to me?” As cloud computing first appears to be primarily an operational-centric paradigm, it is easy to understand the reason this is as...